


Burning Maserati

by tuesday_reads



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Exy (All For The Game), Andreil, Baltimore, Bodyguard Andrew Minyard, Bodyguard!Andrew, Butcher Neil Josten, Butcher!Neil, Canon Compliant, Established Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard, Exy (All For The Game), Hurt Neil Josten, M/M, Mentioned Baltimore (All For The Game), Mentioned Nathan Wesninski, Nathan Wesninski's Bad Parenting, Neil Josten as Nathaniel Wesninski, POV Neil Josten, Protective Andrew Minyard, Torture, for some of it anyway, if you've read the books you'll probably be fine with the graphic descriptions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22949074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday_reads/pseuds/tuesday_reads
Summary: When Neil is crowned as the new Butcher, he and Andrew are forced to navigate their relationship under new circumstances. They're bloodier, deadlier, and filthier than anything they've faced before, and it's going to take more than broken promises to keep each other alive. It's not ideal, but hey, if they always got what they deserved, they wouldn't be Foxes.....A Butcher!Neil and Bodyguard!Andrew fic that features exy, friendship, found family, a certain ginger in a dress, daggers, fast cars, and unconditional love. Also, cats.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 17
Kudos: 82





	Burning Maserati

**Author's Note:**

> Hi friends!  
> This is the introductory/setting chapter for this fic, so there's plenty more to come.
> 
> It's a retelling of the Baltimore scene, so tw for knives/blood/torture. Basically canon-compliant violence. Please stay safe!! If you want me to add any tags please let me know.
> 
> EDIT: While this fic Does have a storyline that will be explored in further chapters, upon further reflection I realized that this chapter essentially reads like torture porn. I'm going to come back to it and rewrite certain aspects to alleviate this issue. But until then, please know that I'm aware of my mishaps. I got carried away when exploring these story elements and I apologize how they translated!

Fear is a funny thing. It gallops through your bloodstream like a wild dog and swallows any sense of rationality that refuses to pick up its feet and run. Nothing takes over a person’s body quite like fear can. It starts in your heart, forcing the muscle to pound out a staccato rhythm only you can feel, before spreading into your lungs where a tiny universe blooms and sucks out all of your breath through its own vacuum. Tenderly, it slips between your ribcage and mingles with whatever it was you had for breakfast or lunch or perhaps dinner that day. There, it sits; waits. Eventually, the fear seeps into your bloodstream and travels up through blue veins, oxygen fuelling the terror, where it takes over the brain. Nerve ends fizzle and crack against one and other to make fingers shake and limbs tense. Nothing makes a person metamorphosise quite like fear, and right now Neil Josten is cocooned so tightly within the emotion he doesn’t know if he will make it out alive. 

* * *

Neil opens his eyes only to be met with another wall of stark black nothing. For a bleak moment, he thinks he’s back at The Nest with Riko and Jean, and then his brain supplies the image of his mother and a life on the run. The memory stills the panic forming in his chest, but after taking stock of the room he realises he’s somewhere much, much worse than Evermore or a grimy hotel room in Paris. The basement of his father’s Baltimore mansion is almost exactly the same as when Neil saw it last, when he and Mary had sprinted through it at three o’clock in the morning with bags thrown haplessly over their shoulders.

Fear commandeers the breath in Neil’s lungs, forcing it up into his throat where it catches and chokes him raw. He’s in Baltimore, which means his father is upstairs, somewhere, planning on butchering his son until nothing but pieces of him remain. Neil reaches out into the darkness and fumbles through it until he fingers on the light switch beneath the stairwell. Flicking it on does nothing for his growing panic, but he pushes it down and refocuses his attention to the present. He has to get out, and he has to get out fast.

Through the dizzying force of fear, he registers the burning sensation on his arms, his hands, his face. It feels like someone pressed them into a supernova, millions of tiny bursts of light dancing along his skin and burrowing under his epidermis, setting him alight from the inside out. He clenches his fists to assess the damage and winces at the agony he’s met with, but when he looks down, he finds there’s nothing bleeding. It’s just crusted over blood and fluid, and he wonders how something can hurt so bad while looking so tame. He definitely won’t be able to hold a racket. Something inside him breaks, and it’s the dim acknowledgment that he may never hold an exy racket ever again.

With Lola out of the room, Neil urges himself into survival mode. It’s a familiar feeling and he clings to it like the lifeline it is. He’ll do anything short of cutting off his own hand to escape, and even that isn’t completely out of the equation, because he knows exactly what will happen to him if he doesn’t. Blood. Bone. Fifty feet below.

He presses his fingers into the tender palms of his hands again, nails digging into the slices that cover his skin like the rungs of a ladder. It centres him in a way only pain can, which makes him think of Andrew and his black armbands, and for the first time, Neil thinks that maybe he understands. He squeezes his eyes shut, eyelashes featherlight against whatever mess is on his cheek. Between the physical pain in his hands and the emotional whiplash of that thought he somehow manages to tether himself back to the present.

The sink in the corner of the basement is pristine. Surgical grade steel sparkles against the rest of the squalid room and Neil pads over to it and turns on the water. Grudgingly, he presses his hands into the stream, barely suppressing a pained moan at the way the pressure pounds against his injuries. It’s so blindingly bright in his head that his body flips a switch. Rinse. Soap. Scrub. Rinse. Repeat. As he floats above and watches himself by the sink scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing, he understands that this is redundant. If he’s too slow to escape there won’t be a risk of infection. But Neil’s spent the better half of his life working to avoid such a threatening consequence and he can’t seem to turn that part of his brain off. It’s second nature at this point, and he’s too out of it to force himself away from the habit.

In retrospect, this was probably the worst decision he could have made. Because as he’s rushing towards the basement door there’s a sound from the top of the stairs. Air catches in his lungs and his legs lock. Adrenaline is quick to take over his limbs and soon he’s crouched in front of the door with his heart pounding in his ears. The bobby pin in his hands isn’t the ideal lockpicking device, but it will have to do. Neil’s surprised to find himself taking note to thank Allison for pinning them into his bandana for the Bearcats game. And then again to himself for missing one after he cleaned up. As he’s jimmying the piece of shit excuse for a lockpick against the mechanism, the door opens.

Neil is unsurprised to find that it isn’t the door in front of him, but the one that leads into the main house. Panic wars with desperation that wars with rage that wars with fear that dissipates into furious annoyance. But he doesn’t stop. He works against the lock until the pin slips from his fingers and pings onto the floor. Footsteps echo against the basement’s walls. Neil makes a desperate grab for the door handle while whispering a desperate prayer for it to _please, open_. 

“Nathaniel.” 

Nathans voice alone is enough to bring Neil to his knees.

“My son,” Nathan drawls from behind Neil, “if you think you can run away from me again you are just as stupid as your mother. Turn around.”

He can’t. With every syllable from Nathan's mouth Neil curls even tighter into himself, memories collapsing in on themselves like a house of cards. He closes his eyes and drags in a battered breath, and then he forces himself to let Neil Josten go. 

“Come now, Junior. Is that any way to act when reunited with your father?” Lola’s voice is high-pitched and preening. Nathaniel knows she’s enjoying this; isn’t making any effort to hide the fact.

Someone grabs Nathaniel from behind and his body lashes out like a loaded spring, his mind sluggish against muscle memory. His elbow connects with something hard and he grins, manic and unhinged. The arms holding him tighten around his ribs and he gasps when something cracks against the force. Somewhere behind them, Nathan laughs, soft and low. Nathaniel kicks at the door as he’s helplessly dragged away from it; digs his nails into the arms circling him; screams for them to stop because it _hurts_. 

“Are you going to be good, junior?” Lola whispers into his ear as his body goes limp. To Nathan, she coos, “Seems our little Junior has grown a spine! This is going to be fun.”  


“I’m going to enjoy hurting you,” Nathan says as he stands in front of Romero, Nathaniel crushed against his chest. 

The force of his father’s fist against his cheek is achingly familiar. The hit lands a bullseye on Nathaniel’s burned cheek – he remembers now; a dashboard lighter – and he sees static. It crackles against his vision and seeps into his auditory system, a blistering roar in his ears that sends him falling. Before he can hit the floor, Nathan catches him by the throat.

Nathaniel’s neck jerks backward and then forward as he scrambles for purchase against a surface that isn’t there. The hands holding him up are angry. Nathaniel thinks they might be shaking with the expanse of it, but he can’t be sure the tremor isn’t his own. As he starts to choke on his own breath, he fights against the urge to grapple at his father’s wrist; he knows better than that. But Nathan wants him to, and Nathaniel knows his father will stand there for however long it takes to get the reaction he’s searching for. In the end, it’s less of a fight with himself and more of a frantic claw for oxygen. Nathaniel cannot breathe and every cell in his body is starving for it.

Finally, his hands lash out and wrap around his father’s wrist. They pull uselessly against a grip forged from hot iron and the desperate rage of a father’s disappointment, and Nathaniel heaves in what he thinks will be his last breath. Lights dance across his vision as the room flickers in and out of reality, the moments featherlight with his slowing pulse. As he’s feeling himself slip away, Nathan drops him. As soon as his body hits the floor, he’s gulping down air as fast as his body will allow. The ache of it burns his nose, his lungs, his eyes, and his stomach. The shock of it hits his system like the rush of the ocean because as fast as his body was to suck in the air, it’s just as quick to throw it away. Suddenly, his diaphragm is being wracked by some invisible force, his body betraying him as it coughs up the oxygen he so desperately needs. 

As he’s convulsing on the floor by his father’s feet, Nathaniel thinks of the Foxes. Of Dan’s fierce game and Alison’s loyalty. Of Matt’s easy smile and headstrong worry; Kevin’s stubborn determination and Nicky’s ferocious positivity. Of Renee’s selflessness and even Aaron's cruel independence. And, of course, of Andrew. Of his steadfast reliability and brutal love, conditional only because it has to be. Nathaniel misses them all so much he aches. 

Eventually, he throws up. The acid burns his throat as his stomach spasms painfully, and his eyes water, salty tears stinging his cheek. At the end of it all, he gathers the thoughts of his teammates up and locks them away, and then he puts himself back together limb by limb, muscle by muscle, breath by breath, and stands. He turns towards Nathan who stares back, bored and disgusted.

“Fuck you,” Nathaniel gets out, low and ruined, but fearless, nonetheless.

Beneath the fluorescent bulb above, he watches Nathan’s slow smile take shape. Shadows cast ghostly silhouettes along one half of his father’s profile, and they dance between the crevices of his face, gliding and dipping into the wrinkles on his forehead and the dimples in his cheeks. The flickering light overhead illuminates his too-white teeth, visible only because of the grin etched into his face. He’s a nightmare made reality. 

“I taught you better than that, Junior. It seems you’ve forgotten who I am,” Nathan mocks. He takes a step towards Nathaniel, who flinches so hard he almost falls backward over himself. “You can leave now, Lola. Nathaniel and I have several years of lost father and son time to make-up for.”

Lola pouts but does as she’s told, sliding a cool look over to Nathaniel before making her way up and out of the basement, heels clicking against the wooden staircase as she goes. Nathaniel notices that Romero is no longer with them, either. It’s just him, alone and afraid, staring at a demon.

“You know I don’t usually like to prolong this part of the job Nathaniel, but you’ve caused me so much trouble that I’m going to make a special exception,” Nathan turns and begins to make his way towards the small arsenal along the far wall, “just for you.” He turns to look at Nathaniel when he says this last part, and it chills the thin film of sweat forming along his skin.

While Nathan feigns indecision over choosing what weapon he’ll be using to gut his own son, Nathaniel frantically looks around the empty space. His breaths are coming hard and fast, and they sound too loud in the otherwise quiet room. Between growing up in the house of a mob boss and spending years working at nothing but the act of disappearing, he’s the most prepared person for this situation. A locked room. A ticking tock. A fight for his life. None of that is new for Nathaniel Wesninski, but he’s never had to do it alone. And now that he is, he doesn’t know what to do. He wishes his mother was here. He wishes Andrew was here, and then he immediately feels guilty for wishing Andrew were anywhere near this.

As he’s scouring the room at a standstill, searching for anything that could be used as a weapon, his eyes catch on a piece of metal glinting against the light. He takes an experimental step towards it but is immediately stopped by his father’s voice telling him to stay where he is. Nathan doesn’t dignify him with the effort of turning around. Just as Nathaniel is telling himself to keep stepping forwards, his body has already paused, still as a statue. _Fuck him_ , Nathaniel thinks, furiously annoyed with himself for being so easily scared. With his body trained on the disregarded piece of steel, he risks a glance towards his father's back and decides that his best bet is to make a dash for the object. It doesn’t matter what happens after he gets there, as long as he can pocket it; a hidden weapon to even the odds. 

He doesn’t bother with trying to be discrete about it, just picks up his feet and runs faster than he ever has on the court. Time ripples around Nathaniel; he’s the stone skipping across the lake, fast and purposeful, his only goal to get as far as physics will take him. The air around him quivers with his own forceful breaths, drowning out the sound of his sneakers squeaking against the floor. He doesn’t know where Nathan is. Everything is syrup, thick and slow. 

He presses the entirety of his weight into his left foot and dives towards the ground. His body hits it, hard, but he wasn’t prepared for it to hurt so much. At least one broken rib, then. He grinds his teeth together and squeezes his eyes shut, a shuddering breath escaping through his mouth. With his stomach pressed against the ground and his arms outstretched, Nathaniel blindly grasps for the object as he struggles against the sharp pain in his side. Suddenly, a hand wraps around his ankle. Nathaniel’s eyes shoot open. The first thing he sees is a sliver of metal and he wraps his ruined hands around it, quick as lightning. He’s the skipping stone, and he will not sink. 

“You little shit,” Nathan growls. 

Nathaniel kicks out with his legs as he slips the sharp piece of metal beneath his tongue. It hurts but in the familiar way of breathing in one of Andrews cigarettes. It’s grounding; a silent promise that he isn’t dead yet. The pain in his mouth is replaced with a feeling of nausea when he feels his father press a knife to the tendons in his ankle. _No_ , Nathaniel thinks, _anything but that, please_. He’s still in an instant.

“Oh,” his father says, fake surprise etched into his voice. “Don’t move. I promise you’ll regret it.”

Nathaniel nods, once.

“Good.”

His father pauses, “then again, I don’t want you running anywhere a second time.”

Nathaniel instantly recognises the implications of these words, and his muscles coil so tightly that he’s left shaking.

“NO!”

Nathan presses the blade further into Nathaniel’s skin, dangerously close to his Achilles. Nathaniel begs him to stop, pleas pouring out of him until he can’t recognise himself under the fear. But Nathan’s a lion gone too long without food, a father too long without violence, and he’s starving. While Nathaniel’s sure that the years between then and now have been plentiful with carnage and bloodshed, it was all, ultimately, dull and unsatisfying. Because Nathan is a special breed of monster, and he needs the intimate kind of violence that can only be found in the basement of a boy’s childhood home.

Nathaniel screws up his face, his auburn hair curling with sweat and sticking to his forehead. He feels like a child. But the person meant to protect him is the one doing the damage, and he has no one else. Tears gather in the corners of his eyes, filling like a cupped hand under running water. It doesn’t take long for them to overflow, and soon he’s holding back sobs as his father runs a blade up and down his bare legs. 

His father presses a particularly deep slice into his calf when Nathaniel lets a sob escape, chocked and raw with terror. It only makes the tears flow faster, the salt hitting the burn on his cheek forgotten to the excruciating pain of slowly being cut apart. _This is it_ , Nathaniel thinks, _years of running only to end up in the one place I was meant to escape_. If he didn’t die tonight his mother would come back and kill him. 

“Are we having fun now?” Nathans honey-soaked voice purrs as he hauls Nathaniel up by the arm. 

“Are _you_?” Nathaniel asks. _You piece of shit_. The second he says it he regrets it, knowing full well that the answer is ‘yes’.

Nathans smile is small but eager, and Nathaniel can see a smeared streak of blood at the corner of it. His blood, he realises after a moment. Nathan pulls him up and tells him to stand. Nathaniel promptly falls back down. His hands come out to brace for the fall that he wasn’t expecting, but his body is so worn out that his brain doesn’t respond. His head hits the concrete, and his father laughs. 

“You’re pathetic. I’ve hardly touched you.”

Blood boils beneath Nathaniel’s skin. He should keep his mouth shut, shouldn’t throw gasoline on an already raging fire. But he’s still himself, tortured or not.

“You’ve hardly touched me? You’ve _hardly touched me_? I’m covered in my own blood,” he can feel it pooling around his toes, the slow, thick stream of it trickling down his leg, “and I can hardly stand.”

Andrew would tell him to shut up, to stop being a smart mouth for just one second. But Nathaniel is so angry and confused; he can feel himself unraveling from the inside out, years of pain and untapped feelings uncoiling like a bare thread.

“You’re obsessed,” Nathaniel starts, and he finds that once he’s said it, he’s unable to stop. “Your wife left you and took the only other thing you could hit, and it _hurt_. I would say it’s because you thought she loved you, but a low-life Baltimore piece of shit like you could never love, let alone be loved. Not like that. She never loved you. I never loved you. Not when you picked me up as a newborn, when you finally, _finally_ , had something to tie her down; had someone more to ruin. Not when you picked me up after falling down the stairs, the one time you weren’t the one to have pushed me down them. Not when you kicked me for dropping a stupid glass jar and used the jagged pieces to ‘teach me a lesson’. Not even when you told me I might play exy for the rest of my life. And you know what? She never fucking loved you either.” 

Nathaniel was panting now, the rage and hurt spilling out of him at a rate so fast he feels dizzy. He’s standing, but he isn’t sure how or when he’d gotten up from the floor. He stumbles forward, slipping on his own blood and leaving a trail of it as he goes. Nathan looks on unaffected, but Nathaniel can see the crease in his brow; the way he holds the cleaver tighter. _Good_ , Nathaniel thinks. He keeps walking as he speaks.

“You’re ruined, and you know it. A decade of searching for a pair of people, a _family_ , that never loved you, who were spending every aching moment trying to rid themselves of you once and for all. And for what? just to kill them? You’re psychotic,” Nathaniel spits, and he feels like he’s stepping over an edge. He feels unhinged. Nothing could stop him from doing what happened next, not even the Foxes walking through the basement door. 

He lunges at Nathan, pulling the sharp piece of metal from beneath his tongue. Nathaniel’s limbs are on fire with adrenaline. It courses through his veins, destroying every inch of fear that he’d been clinging to. He’s so angry. He grabs Nathan by the neck and pushes the ragged edge into his throat, feeling it imbed itself in his fathers’ rough skin. Nothing is slow now. Limbs are pushed and pulled, tugged and squeezed; nails sink into flesh and elbows hit bone. Blood blooms at Nathan's neck like a flower opening in spring, blood red and bright. Nathaniel had been aiming for his carotid, and he hopes with everything that he landed true.

As the energy seeps out of his system, his rage turned to sadness and his screams returning to sobs, he uses the last of it to loop his arm around Nathan's neck. Nathan hadn’t been expecting this much fight from him and Nathaniel knows he has the upper hand - he intends to use it. He leans in, the scent of copper and iron filling his lungs.

“Why couldn’t you have just let us go?” He keens into his father’s ear. Desperation and fear war with each other in his head, seeping into his voice. The feeling of so much blood under his hands is starting to make him feel sick, the scent so strong he isn’t sure if he’ll ever smell anything else again. He feels Nathan tense as his own body ebbs further into collapse, and with his last bit of strength he whispers, “was it worth it, dad?”

A pause. Nathaniel’s heartbeat jackrabbits in the space of it, a quickening rhythm that skitters quietly in the echoing basement but roars in his head. The muscles in his legs are shaking with the effort of holding up his body weight, the cuts so deep they might be bare inches from his bone. _They’ll need stitches_ , he thinks quietly, unnecessarily. While his brain fights to keep him alert and awake, his body is caught in a limbo between flight or fight. Nathaniel thinks that flight, in this case, will involve his body blocking out as much of the pain as possible, which means passing out. If that happens, he might not wake up again. But his vision is flickering static and his eyelids are heavy. Nausea worms its way into his stomach, and he thinks that, maybe, he should just let go.

As he feels his father bracing, muscles coiling tight to prepare for shoving Nathaniel off of him, the door at the top of the stairs slams open. Lola runs down, tripping over several of the steps in her two-inch stilettos, but she doesn’t let that slow her. Nathaniel blinks once and she’s standing right in front of them. She’s cautious and curious, looking at Nathaniel’s bloodied body and smirking incrementally, then taking in the full picture: Nathaniel, with his left arm, hooked around Nathan's neck, a piece of metal jutting out from the side of it as blood slowly leaks from the wound. Something changes on Lola’s face and slowly Nathaniel realises it’s because she’s nervous. She should not have interrupted.

Nathan is furious and he tells her as much, shoving Nathaniel off as he does so. He falls limply to the floor and makes no effort to get up again. Through the roaring pain, he can faintly make out arguing - loud and brash - until Lola leans into his father’s shoulder and whispers something unintelligible. Belatedly, Nathaniel releases she’s holding a phone.

He’s so sore. His legs are more cut-up now than Riko had ever been capable of inflicting at Evermore. Blood squelches against his hands and feet as he attempts to stand. Nathaniel wants nothing more than to lay down and give in, but his mother’s voice is a whisper in his head, urgent and angry, telling him to _get up, Abram. We have to go, now. GET UP_. 

With both of his captors distracted, Nathaniel attempts to run, his body and brain slipping into autopilot. In his panicked state, he neglected to account for Romero, who must have been trailing Lola when she entered. Nathaniel is startled, but unsurprised, to find that he’s waiting right behind him with a fist full of fury. He falls easily from the hit, stumbling back twice before his legs completely give out. Romero is quick to pick him up from the ground and secure him against his chest, and Nathaniel laughs. If they think he’s capable of being a threat in this state, then they must be stupider than they look. Some awful part of his brain holds onto this, giddy with the notion that they underestimated him so badly. 

Lola quickly hands over the phone to Nathan. Nathaniel doesn’t care who’s on the other end of the line if only he can get away from here and these people who were meant to be his family. He pauses when he hears Nathan swear. 

Nathaniel watches cautiously as his father leans into the phone. He’s propped it between his neck and shoulder so as to leave his arms free to toy with the cleaver, and he greets the caller in a language that Nathaniel, somehow - against the fog flooding his brain - recognises is Japanese. Everything inside of him that had filled so quickly with hope dissipates into nothing. He thought it might have been the police, bartering for Nathan to come out before they storm the building. _Stupid_ , he thinks. 

No one is coming for him. 

He slumps into Romero’s body, defeated. All he can taste is blood and sweat. All he can think about is how he’s about to die. All he can feel is Andrew's lips on his. 

Slowly, reaches into his pocket, hoping to find the house key Andrew gave him in Columbia, but his hands find nothing but fabric. Crying seems overdramatic in the same way it felt to watch Kevin fuss over his injuries after Evermore, but his body fills up with tears anyway. Nathaniel didn’t think he could feel so empty and full at the same time. He misses his Foxes. Hesitantly, he clenches his fist around the empty space that should have housed a key and thinks of his real family, and everything he promised them as Neil Josten.

Nathaniel watches lazily as Nathan pauses midway through dragging his index finger along the blunt edge of the cleaver. His brows furrow and Nathaniel rams his elbow into Romero’s ribs. Using the momentum to propel himself around he brings a knee up and connects it with the body in front of him. He doesn’t stop to see what sort of damage he’s done - if any at all- before sprinting for the basement door. It opens before he can get to it. Nathaniel doesn’t stop running towards it. Time slows. His mind briefly registers that he hasn’t been hit; no one is stopping him. 

He pushes past the figure in the doorway, the only thing in his body the deafening hum of _run, run, run_. Abruptly, he’s stopped by someone grabbing his wrist. He doesn’t bother looking at them, just twists his arm in a desperate attempt to escape, but he crumples to his knees at the pain he’s met with. _Let me go_ , he pleads with the empty air in his lungs.

He hears a gun cocked. The sound of a body hitting a wall behind him. The bang of a gun going off. The ping as the bullet’s shell skitters across the floor. 

No one’s holding onto him anymore, and fear and adrenaline battle for control in his blood. Fear wins out because when he tries to get to his feet, he finds himself covering his head with his ruined hands instead. Nathaniel caves into himself, making his presence as small as he can. _Don’t touch me_ , he thinks. _Just let me go_.

Someone lightly touches the back of his neck, and he screams. It’s a terrible sound that Nathaniel doesn’t recognise as his own until it stops and another one pulls from his throat. It’s choked by heaving sobs that tear at his chest, his heart, his neck, his abdomen. Nothing will ever be okay again. 

The hand on his neck tightens and for a startling moment, he thinks its Andrew, knows it is. It has to be. It’s Andrew, who has come back for him despite the forgotten promise he’d bargained for only hours ago. Nathaniel sucks in a half breath. Then, another and another and another until he can see the ground at his feet again. 

Andrew moves to the front of Nathaniel’s crumpled form without removing his hand from the back of his neck. 

“Nathaniel,” the voice says, and Nathaniel’s body tenses from head to toe. 

Slowly, he looks up to find the person attached to the hand is Ichiro Moriyama, not Andrew Minyard.

“Look at me when I am talking to you,” Ichiro starts in thickly accented English. Nathaniel forces his eyes to meet the pair staring back at him, the eyes that are neither empty nor hazel. 

“Good. Now, listen carefully, Nathaniel. I will not be made to repeat myself,” Ichiro states.

He crouches in front of Nathaniel and slowly retracts his hand from its place on his neck. 

“You,” he says as he tilts Nathaniel’s chin up with featherlight fingers, “are going to be my new butcher.”

**Author's Note:**

> So... that's chapter one down. If you're keen to find out how Neil handles being Ichiros Butcher please bookmark the fic! Also, as promised, later chapters will contain assassin/butcher Neil in a dress... and Andrew as his lover/bodyguard. Please leave a kudos if you liked it, they motivate me to Actually write aghsja.
> 
> Chapters will be between 3-5k long. I'm a full-time uni student so I might be slow to upload, but I'll get there eventually!
> 
> Much love, Tuesday <3


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